> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Hoff-Le-Tao-de-Winnie/963522

This book was very disappointing. While there is some wisdom in it - slow your life down, try to live more harmoniously, etc - this had way too much of the "don't try, just let things happen and it will all work out" message that was present in Coelho's "The Alchemist."(Maybe Hoff was channeling Coelho when he wrote this.) However what I found most deplorable was Hoff's flat out repudiation of science. His reasoning for this was ill-informed at best, willfully ignorant at worst; and, I'm quite sure he makes use of the inventions of science just as much as the rest of us. Science doesn't have all the answers concerning life, the universe and everything, but it has some (and clearly far more than Hoff bothered to educate himself concerning), and the number and quality of them is every-increasing.

If you want to read a useful book about engaging life and other people, get James Carse's "Finite and Infinite Games". It's a better book, better written and doesn't hypocritically tell you to ditch the very thing that made mass distribution of it possible.

( )

I don't like this in audio format. It's not a book for breezing through. ( )

It's certainly not a bad book and as a total newcomer it seems to give a good introduction to Taoism. It's just hard to be super impressed when such a notable amount of the text appears to be directly lifted from either the Pooh stories or translations of existing Taoist writings...I mean, whole pages of text are sometimes reprinted!

I would however be interested in learning more about Taoism, so that's not bad :) ( )

I picked this up after an Audible sale. This is often referred to as the best primer for Taoism. I’ll admit, I’m not much of a philosopher so this was harder to get into than I thought. As an audiobook, I also had a hard time differentiating between the narrator’s version of Eeyore vs. Pooh or other similar characters like Piglet and Rabbit. And, it’s hard for me to really buy into this philosophy at all – that things are as they’re meant to be, in their natural state. If that’s the case, my natural state is spiteful cynicism.

( )